According to my new book on bears (Bears, Bears, Bears), the spectacled bear is the only remaining descendant of the short-faced bears, which explains why it has the shortest muzzle among the bear family. I hadn't realized there were any descendants of the short-faces remaining. Which is why books on bears are so valuable- you should all go buy some today.
Since I can't show you my book, here is a website with the same info. And I like this drawing of what a short-faced bear might have looked like, while this scary guy comes from the BBC website.

I was reading this passage in Jonathan Stroud's The Golem's Eye:

The second John Mandrake was a furniture-maker's son who had spent his life researching the many variants of demonic mite. He had amassed a list of 1703 increasingly irrelevant subtypes before one of them, a Lesser Frilled Green Hornetwing, stung him in an unguarded area; he swelled to the size of a chaise lounge and so died.

Just then some kind of smallish bug of a type I had never seen before landed on my chest and tried to bite me. So I decided it would be prudent to prevent this from happening. But it got me to thinking- that would be a cool way for a book to be interactive. I'm not really sure how they would accomplish that though. Maybe through nanolasers, fiberoptics or a certain type of geosynchronous satellite, or more likely through some combination of all three.

Conveying what a coal mine is like to non-miners can be difficult. I tell Michelle all kinds of stories about my life out at work but she tends to just smile and nod while feigning complete comprehension. (An example of how our lingo can be confusing to non-miners- when I talk about shovels they invariably think I am talking about the implement you have hanging in your shed. But I'm not.) So this past week I was able to bring her and my mom out for a little tour. It was really fun to share my world with her, and now she has a bit of a better appreciation for what I am talking about when I tell her that I can lift 100 tons with one hand!

But I'll let Michelle tell you about her day herself:

Well, being completely naive about mining and small towns and being a through-and-through city girl, I had to rely on Grandma and Grandpa Waddell to outfit me accordingly. I was all ready to wear a white hoodie and my new hiking boots out to the mine when Grandma Waddell went fishing for an old pair of boots and a bright green windbreaker for me to wear. "It will be dirty out there, dear."

Of course I knew it was going to be dirty, but did I really? Nathan pulled up in the mining van and he had covered the seats with paper towel for us to sit on - my first induction to the filth of the mine.


As we drove around, my eyes grew larger and larger at the sites before me. Nath turned to me and said, "So hon, what do you think?" I just looked back at him (with that look of deers blinded in headlights), "It's really . . . big." And said no more. I don't think Nathan had any clue what to do with me at that point.

We eventually made it out to Cheviot mine (its about 20km away from the parking lot and I have never experienced a road like that in my life. The puddles and mud were unlike anything a city girl has ever experienced!)

Dusty (the foreman with whom I forever hold a grudge against for taking my fiance away every 4 days) gave us permission to go and visit Nathan's dad in his shovel. I actually climbed the ladder and entered my very first mining shovel ever and wow! It was really cool!

My first comment (betraying again my city girl-ness) was "This looks exactly like the cockpits in Star Wars!" (the ones you see Luke or Han siting in and fighting the star destroyers with). Nathan's dad sat in this chair, with a huge convex window in front of him (it even went underneath his feet!), operating this huge monster with 2 tiny video game joy sticks. It was incredible and at that moment, I was won over to the work of the mine!

After our stint with Nathan's dad, we again got special permission from Dusty (good ole Dusty) to go and look at the brand, spankin' new shovel they are building for Nath's dad to use.

Well, this naive city girl got to sit in this incredibly sophisticated machine, in the captain's chair (I know its not a space ship but we'll call it the captain's chair, okay?) before Nathan's Dad, the most experienced shovel operator at the entire mine, did. What an honor! And the best part??? The chair had a control for massagers and heat! Who needs the joysticks to control the shovel when you've got this?! It was perfect and so perfect that I couldn't resist but rub it in a little to Nath's dad :)

So, my experience to the mine was absolutely incredible. It started out quite daunting but proved to be very, very cool and I'm very, very proud of what my fiance does! Never again will I simply smile and nod, pretending to understand, because now I really do!!

While I toss around some half-formed ideas in my head (it's really too bad that "lemon" and "demon" don't actually rhyme), here is an interactive flickr photo of my work area so you can see where all the poo comes from. Uh . . . you know what I mean.
Related links: Gotthammer- He is going to marry me and Michelle, and I am pretty excited about that.
blu- he is designing my next tattoo, and I am pretty ecxited about that too!
Jackiewyse- who I meant to thank for sending me the Dutch polar bear christmas card and I never got around to it. I= bad friend! Thanks Jackie!
Where I got my wallpaper.
And the desk and computer and some of the action figures actually belong to gabrielle, who I abandoned in New Zealand so I could steal her stuff.

I am a Super Summit Scaler! What are you?
Did you know that the New Zealand five dollar bill has a picture of Sir Edmund Hillary on it? I thought they should call them Eddies, but no one else agreed with me. I tired to save some to bring back with me for my journal, but then I got to the Auckland Airport and discovered it costs $25 just to leave the place. Some kind of aiport tax, only payable in cash. No one told me! So I sadly gave them the five remaining Eddies I had in my wallet, and now I have none. But at least I am a Super Summit Scaler! No one can take that away from me.

How To Buy An Engagement Ring

As I recently learned, buying a diamond ring is no easy task, even for someone like myself who has a degree in geology. Knowing about kimberlite pipes and all that is of no help when choosing the gem that will symbolize your love for and commitment to the woman you love. You need to know about the four 'C's, which are Color, Cut, umm, Caratness and . . . cuality? Craftmanship? Cookie monster? I'm not really sure, so you can see where I might have been in over my head. I kind of shuffled in to the jeweller and tried to pretend I knew what I was talking about.
"Can I help you, sir?" the kindly jeweler asked.
"Yes, I'm looking for a diamond, you know, something with lots of carats and colors."
"Very good sir. You might be interested in this one, which is a little over 1 carat and has outstanding clarity."
"Oh yeah, that one's nice," I say, surreptitiously glancing at the price tag. Whoa! It's a little high- might as well buy a diamond mine and dig your own for that price. "What about that one over there?"
And so he showed me a series of stones, each one with its own qualities, good and bad, but none with that elusive, indefinable "This is the one-ness". Ever patient, the jeweller showed me yet another.
"You might be interested in this one; it was mined here in Canada and has the trademarked polar bear emblem laser-etched on its surface."
"It has a polar bear on it? Really? Let me see!"
"Of course, you can't actually see the polar bear as it is microscopic; it is merely there as an assurance of quality."
"But you're saying this one has a polar bear on it, though, right? No fooling?"
"No fooling."
"I'll take it."
"Very good, sir."

Defender of the Crown for the Amiga was the ultimate in computing technology, back when I was a kid- and now there is an exact Flash version online to relive those glorious days. My friends Jon (aka Jonny Smelter) and Doug and I used to play after school all the time. We each had different jobs - Doug did the raiding, I did the catapulting and Jon did the jousting, which was the hardest by far. We persevered and eventually defended the crown all the way to Crowntown.
Oh yeah and Barbarian and Marble Madness. Best games ever, but I couldn't find Flash versions of them so you just have to take my word for it.

Pooing in the Woods has a new look! Yay! What do you think? I'm still working on the finer details like my link menus and a title bar and stuff, but for now here is the shinier, cleanier Poo!
I've been wanting to make the site a little easier to read for quite a while now- something more along the lines of a classic black-text-on-white-background. All I needed was for it to be more better than just a white background with black text. So I asked the amazing and generous Sarah How of Pencil Shavings to draw me some bears. Huge thanks and bear hugs to Sarah. I love her art- so fun and joyful.
Please let me know what you think (in the droppings), and if it shows up alright on your screen- it looks good to me but I have 800 X 600 resolution. I used alignment and relative-position tags rather than absolute pixel positions in my CSS so I think it should still be alright regardless of your resolution. I think- I glean all my CSS knowledge by googling "CSS tutorials" whenever I need to tinker.
This is what you should see, hopefully:



And I saved the old template with all the links here.

Here is a question for Digger or anyone else schooled in archeology or paleoanthropology: is anyone exploring the possibility of a connection between the Arctic Small Tool culture and Homo floresiensis? Because someone should.

After six nightshifts you might think I have turned into a zombie, and you would be correct. That's why I have reanimated my corpse with an all-Zombie playlist which I share with you here:

1. Start off with the monster track of all Zombietunes- More Human Than Human. Arrgh my disc is scratched, but the skips sorta sound like a cool remix, so it's okay I guess. I am the astro-cr-cr-cr-creep!
2. Move back in time a bit for some Thunder Kiss '65. Yeah!
3. Though Rob has had a pretty good solo career, with Dragula and Living Dead Girl and appearing on pretty much every comic book movie soundtrack for the past 7 years, I think his cover of Blitzkrieg Bop is the best thing he has done post-White. ZombieRamones!
4. But come to think of it I haven't heard Dragula for a while so throw that on, too!
5. Rob's brother Spider fronts Powerman 5000 and everybody loves Nobody's Real.
6. You probably know that Scum of the Earth are part of the Zombie universe, since it features members of both Zombie and Powerman, and Get Your Dead On actually helps you get your dead off, and wakes you right up!
7. Finally, make up your own song about zombie bears and send it to me! Mine goes like this:

Zombie bears! Yeah! Zombie! Bears! Yeah!

(I've been awake since yesterday, so that is the best I can do as a just-recently reanimated zombie corpse)